As we close out 2025, it’s worth looking back at how much has changed and how much hasn’t. While AI-driven search and changing user behaviors have forced us to rethink long-standing practices, they’ve also reinforced the familiar truth that the fundamentals still matter.
Throughout our “12 Days of SEO” campaign on LinkedIn, we asked experts from Oncrawl and across the industry to share their insights, predictions, and lessons learned. A consistent message emerged, one that suggests success in 2026 will require us to embrace AI literacy without losing sight of core SEO fundamentals.
Here’s what the experts had to say.
Highlights from 2025
What trends, updates or changes shaped our year?
Jérôme Salomon, Senior Technical SEO at Oncrawl, highlighted a critical technical discovery from 2025.
“Indexation in Google remains the main technical SEO challenge in 2025. And it’s both valuable for SEO and AI Search. You can use your server logs to spot pages that are about to be deindexed and that are not indexed anymore.
Thanks to Alexys Rylko’s 130 days rules discovery: If a page hasn’t been crawled by Googlebot in the last 130 days, it’s no longer indexed by Google. Knowing that rule and monitoring your pages last crawl date with logs you will be able to spot: pages no longer indexed and pages at risk (last crawl between 100 and 130 days).
And more generically speaking, it proves that there is correlation between crawl frequency and indexation. Googlebot crawl frequency is a quality signal you can measure and track over time.”
Julien Chemla, SEO Strategist at Oncrawl, noted the shifting attention toward AI.
“This year, we’ve seen increased interest from our customers in AI bots. Google is far from dead, but search is evolving and AI is starting to shape user behavior for informational queries and even transactional ones. It’s not uncommon to see AI bots crawling some sites more frequently than Googlebot.
In 2026, a major focus at Oncrawl will be helping customers optimize for AI visibility; connecting everything we already measure to the goal of being cited and appearing in AI assistants’ answers.”
Omi Sido, Senior Technical SEO & AI Search at Canon Europe, focused on technical innovation in log analysis.
“A highlight from my 2025 work has been applying AI-assisted log analysis at scale to reduce crawl waste (including inefficient AI bot crawls) and uncover hidden crawl bottlenecks.
Using machine learning to segment URLs by crawler behavior surfaced patterns that humans would have missed – leading to better indexation and faster discovery of important pages.”
Best practices & insights
What are the foundational strategies or insights that matter, regardless of how AI is impacting search?
Emina Demiri, Head of Digital Marketing at Vixen Digital, emphasized the importance of moving beyond vanity metrics.
“Stop chasing unmeasurable metrics, especially anything resembling ‘AI rankings.’ Instead, invest this time in truly understanding your audience. Identify real user problems, motivations, and emotional triggers.
Map what users already know or feel about your brand across owned, earned, and paid surfaces. Then, use those insights to shape both pre-click (messaging, SERP presence, targeting) and post-click (UX, trust, CRO) experiences.
This will actually move users closer to action rather than just improving abstract visibility. It will also provide you with the foundation needed to start understanding visibility. Not as an arbitrary metric but as a way to understand how your brand is showing up. Things like, is it aligned or misaligned with your audience needs and topics, is it consistent or all over the place within cited sources…”
Andor Palau, International SEO Consultant, offered some balanced advice so we don’t get lost amidst all the changes.
“Stay focused on your traditional SEO agenda as it sets the foundation, but make sure that you understand the positioning of your brands in LLMs as well. Make sure you have a good understanding of your MOFU content, as many decisions are made here.
The importance in the future will be to be there at the right time. Try to be ‘in the moment’ of your potential customer. Make sure bots and agents can access your content without friction.”
Pauline Pouzou, Senior Technical SEO at Oncrawl, shared a strategic approach to crawl budget, an SEO foundation that is still very important.
“Managing your product lifecycle strategically can significantly increase crawl frequency on your active pages.
By properly handling product statuses by archiving discontinued items, redirecting expired pages, and keeping active inventory fresh, you ensure search engines focus their crawl budget on pages that matter.
This results in better crawlability and improved visibility for your most important content.”
Dani Leitner, International SEO Consultant, provided a 5-step practical framework for building strategies without extensive data.
” 1. Look at Google Search Console: even in the smallest niche, there is data that none of the SEO tools show.
2. Rely on SEO fundamentals: we know how to set up a website that can rank and this is where we can help clients structure their site in a logical, SEO-friendly way.
3. Run a client workshop: in B2B, the best insights come directly from sales and service teams. Most companies have never mapped their full offering, and you can build the strategy around what you learn there.
4. Build the site based on everything you learned in steps 2 and 3.
5. Validate with GSC after 6 months and find the opportunities you missed.”
Helen Pollitt, Director of SEO at Getty Images, cut to the heart of strategic prioritization.
“SEOs should prioritize strategies based on their potential to drive revenue, rather than chasing traffic or trendy tactics. The most effective SEO strategies will be closely aligned to commercial goals.
By evaluating initiatives through a simple lens of revenue impact, SEOs can focus their time and budget on what genuinely moves the needle. This approach helps determine whether new ‘shiny’ fads are truly worth pursuing, or if they should be ignored.”
Murat Yatağan, Growth Advisor & Founder of Fokal, encouraged us to look beyond the noise.
“Marketers need to look past the hype and look at the data. Google still drives significantly more sessions than all LLMs combined, proving that AI isn’t replacing search, but re-segmenting it.
As AI takes over TOFU informational queries, our focus must shift to winning the depth on BOFU content where the real conversion value lives. The goal for 2026 isn’t just traffic. It’s becoming the authoritative source that AI search systems are forced to cite.”
Janaina Barreto-Romero, Senior Technical SEO at Oncrawl, offered practical advice for navigating AI visibility, something that a lot of people have been thinking and talking about this year.
“With so much evolution in the SEO space around AI, we’re having a lot of information thrown our way and trying to grasp it all and put it into a to-do list to see where our sites stand is admittedly overwhelming. Sometimes simplicity is the best approach. If LLM visibility is important to your strategy, I think taking a step back and using the immediate tools available to you is a great start.
Considering you more than likely have access to a crawler, start off with inspecting how your most important pages are ‘seen’ to crawlers. Run a crawl with JavaScript enabled and one as HTML only. From there, compare if key content is visible to AI bots or not. This will shed some light on what they actually see, and help you prioritize if rendering strategies need to be considered. And who knows, maybe we’ll see AI bots processing Javascript in 2026? For now, work with what you’ve got.”
Mickael Serantes, Senior SEO Strategist at Oncrawl, shared a tip about utilizing a data-driven approach that never gets old.
“Use logs to identify cold spots on your site: pages that Googlebot ignores. These are often where weak links in internal linking or orphaned sections are hidden. Correcting these blind spots can have a direct impact on crawling, indexing, and therefore conversions.
Not all SEO issues are created equal. Cross-reference logs, crawl data, and analytics to prioritize high-value actions: pages with high potential, bot frequency, and weight in conversions. This is where SEO ROI becomes measurable.”
Looking ahead: Predictions for 2026
What can we expect to see in 2026? It’s hard to be sure exactly how things will evolve, but our experts have some pretty good ideas about what’s to come.
Emina envisions a fundamental shift in how SEOs will need to operate.
“In 2026, the most successful SEOs will be the ones who fully embrace full-stack thinking, revisit the fundamentals and connect SEO to brand, analytics, UX, and audience research.
As zero-click experiences and AI-mediated answers continue to increase, visibility will become even harder to quantify, forcing SEOs to think outside of the silo. When traffic drops, every click you do get is that much more valuable. The industry will reward those who can explain impact at the business level, not the ranking level.”
Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix Studio’s AI Search Lab, predicts the rise of agentic systems.
“In 2026, the agentic web will change everything…again! Over the last 12 months we’ve seen OpenAI, Google and others releasing solutions for agentic payments, shopping, and agent to agent channels.
As the roll out ramps up we will see more and more consumers using agents in their day-to-day and websites will need to manage agentic access and funnels.
At Wix we’ve made our sites eligible for agentic payments via PayPal and Stripe, giving users the tools to make their own agents and set up MCP. We’re prepped for this agentic future. All marketers should do the same.”
Omi foresees a shift in content quality standards.
“My top prediction for 2026 is that AI-generated content will only be valuable when paired with human fact-checking and high-trust signals.
Search engines will become much better at detecting ‘thin automation’ which means human-authored insight and editorial rigor will once again become key ranking differentiators.”
Murat anticipates a fundamental transformation in optimization strategy.
“By 2026, we will shift from optimizing for keywords to optimizing for entity authority within LLM ecosystems. The winners won’t be the sites with the most backlinks, but those who structure their data so clearly that AI search systems have no choice but to cite them as the primary source of truth. Structured data is no longer optional, it is your vocabulary for speaking to machines.”
Moving forward
Based on the insights from these industry experts, we can assume that 2026 will demand technical excellence, strategic foresight, a better understanding of intent, and more accurate ways to measure business impact.
No matter how the search environment matures, we’ll be here providing the content and resources you need to succeed. Change is inevitable, but your strategy doesn’t have to be guesswork.
Here’s to a successful 2026.
